Starring Andrzej Seweryn, Jerzy Trela, Iwona Bielska, Jan Frycz, Henryk Bista, Grażyna Deląg and Krystyna Janda, the plot follows a team of astronauts who land on an uninhabited planet and form a society.

The scientists realise it is an old, obsolete, "Small Transmission Module", and in their underground laboratory they find it contains the video diary of an astronaut whose spacecraft crashed at least 50 or 60 years ago.

In a lengthy flashback: a group of dissident astronauts crash land on an unnamed Earth-like planet after escaping from a degraded and vaguely dystopian Earth.

Communication with Earth is lost and the survivors decide to settle on the seashore and there they give rise to a new human race.

The new humanity is now a tribe of several dozen people, with whom he can no longer communicate: they are partially feral and view "The Old Man" (Jerzy) as a demigod.

Back on Earth, we learn that the reason Marek was sent to this planet was because his actress girlfriend was sleeping with a fellow officer, Jacek, and they wanted to get rid of him to continue their affair.

After Żuławski's critical success with the 1975 film L'important c'est d'aimer, the Polish authorities in charge of cultural affairs reevaluated their assessment of him.

Until May 1977, further filming was carried out in Police, in Lower Silesia, in the Wieliczka salt mine, in the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, Krakow, again on the coast and in the mountains of the Caucasus.

[7] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 72 out of 100, based on four critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".